"The District!"

By Michael Atkinson
IFC News

[Photo: Áron Gauder's "The District!", Atopia, 2007]

A filthy, confrontational, sophomoric animated feature from Hungary, Áron Gauder's "The District!" (I prefer the less prosaic, more punctuative Hungarian title, "Nyocker!") has a surplus of borrowed hip-hop attitude and proudly lowbrow ghetto texture. But it's Gauder's absolutely distinctive visual docket that is ceaselessly arresting. Call it a smash-up between faux 3-D digital fluidity and cutout cartooning and rotoscoped realism and Ralph Steadman-esque satiric caricature — the upshot is hypnotizing, even when the film's wigger material tends toward the idiotic. Gauder captures his actors in a broad variety of facial poses and then animates the characters using these images (much as each character found expression via the interchange of dozens of different heads in the stop-motion "The Nightmare Before Christmas"). But he also embellishes them graphically, distorts them digitally, and then folds them into hectic, multilayered urban tableaux, all of it seething and brawling and swarming like a real city neighborhood as seen through the scrim of very strong microdots.

Which would all make only a scintillating short, not a feature, if Gauder's timing and deftness with multiple action weren't precise and hilarious; watching the background characters' expressions change on the offbeat, from deadpan to rageful to joyous, is often more fascinating than the foreground business, which often devolves into Magyar hip-hop music videos (and accomplished farces of the form, at that). Seeing these 2-D digi-puppets meet gazes is alone funnier than the last five CGI penguin movies. The plot, which moves like a driverless car, involves a gang of Budapest street kids, many of them Rom, deciding to get rich by traveling back to the Stone Age, killing and burying mammoths where their city block will later be, returning and digging for oil. Which they do (they're even inadvertently responsible for continental drift), and the consequences naturally spiral out into an international debacle that ropes in Osama bin Laden, the Pope and Bush II, all of them given a rightful satiric flogging in the process. "The District!" began as an Adult Swim-style series-within-a-series and might represent the most inventive use of digital animation anywhere, and certainly rules the hard drive work being done elsewhere in Europe.